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MUSIC REVIEW; Poems Thrust Heavenward

For some instances of just how good Barbara Bonney was throughout her recital of American songs at Carnegie Hall on Thursday evening, take ''Why Do They Shut Me Out of Heaven?'' from Copland's sequence of 12 Emily Dickinson settings, the work that occupied the program's second half.

The opening phrase was flung out confidently and beautifully in tune, and the notes seemed to spring from and fill out the piano's harmony, securing the bond between voice and instrument. At the same time they gave a lively impression of someone hot-temperedly asking a question.

Using means proper to singing -- here an almost stinging attack with bright vocal color -- and never resorting to speechlike inflections, Ms. Bonney was showing how musical and expressive effects are not rivals but joined. The high brilliance of her singing was creating the character, and even adding a potent subtext. ''Why do they shut me out of heaven?'' her Dickinson persona was asking, but also, ''Can't they hear I'm already there?''

Later in this song came more such excellent moments. The way Ms. Bonney sang just the word ''bird,'' within the confines of one note, you could feel the warmth, the smallness, the fragility and the feathers. On the line ''Wouldn't the angels try me just once more?,'' she introduced a note of seductiveness that pushed right to the edge of what the poem can stand, but worked perfectly because of her subtlety and tight control. Finally ''Did I sing too loud?'' ended with a fortissimo that made the question real while overwhelming it. No, this could never have been judged too loud. Loud, yes. Big, yes. A note wonderfully in shape, full and rounded, and followed by a diminuendo like a long echo.

Questions about the quality of these songs were blown away. Ms. Bonney made them masterpieces, with notable assistance at the piano from Warren Jones, who shares her sense that expressiveness is to be achieved by musical perfection. His playing was characteristically full of character and choice texture, from springy lightness to convincingly plush yet reedy sonorities to suggest the ''organ talk'' in the 10th song.

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Earlier in the evening Ms. Bonney had sung four songs by Andre Previn to lyrics by Toni Morrison, with David Finckel magnificent and unabashed in the smoochy cello solos, and also some settings of poems by Shakespeare and his contemporaries: Dominick Argento's ''Six Elizabethan Songs'' and a very early Copland piece, ''As It Fell Upon A Day,'' with clarinet (David Shifrin) and flute (Carol Wincenc).

Perhaps so many American composers have set Shakespeare-age verse -- Stravinsky and Milton Babbitt are two others -- to get away from the language, and the attendant musical turns, of popular song in its many forms. Certainly Mr. Argento, in this work of 1957, achieved that distance and found a beautiful and distinctive kind of lyricism.

In the last song of the group, with words by Ben Jonson, Ms. Bonney moved serenely and gorgeously through the slow phrases, changing her level of vibrato to change the gilding of her tone. ''Seated in thy silver chair . . . Goddess, excellently bright'': she seemed to be singing of herself.